TOKYO TWILIGHT is not one of Ozu’s better known films. It was one of the few flops in the 50s and Ozu himself seemed to have felt the film was a failure. This film is more naturalistic and tough than the other family dramas of the period and strikingly, directly critical of the Japanese Patriarch as incarnated by Chishu Ryu who’s stoic passivity before life creates the agon between him and his younger daughter, the younger daughter and her elder sister(played by who else Setsuko Hara) and finally the sister and her estranged mother. Ozu creates a strong social portrait of alienation, underlining his bleak view of a world and society ignorant and indifferent to the struggles of the individual. Ozu was honest and truthful about how this struggle usually panned out but his heart and his soul were always with the people caught up in it. This is a magnificent film.